Iron Chancellor?

Slate has a good article for those interested in German politics and the (probable) upcoming elections in September.

Deutschland’s Iron Lady
Is Angela Merkel the next Maggie Thatcher?

Gerhard Schröder came to Washington last week for what’s likely to be his final visit as German chancellor. This May, after his Social Democratic Party (known in Germany by the initials SPD) was trounced in state elections, Schröder decided to call voters to the national polls in September, a year earlier than necessary, a move some commentators derided as political suicide. Since the SPD’s conservative rival, the Christian Democratic Union, regularly pulls in nearly twice the SPD’s approval ratings (the SPD is stuck in the 20s), it’s hard to find anyone who expects Schröder to be in office come October.

Here are a few more gems:

“If Angela Merkel succeeds “¦ the Federal Republic should see changes more radical than any since 1949.”

Not so fast. Biographies aside, Merkel is no Thatcher. Not only does Germany’s political structure prevent the chancellor from taking on a strong leadership role, but voters are favoring her party largely because they are fed up with Schröder””?not because they are sick of the welfare state. What’s more, Merkel lacks both unified CDU support and the charisma to rally the public behind her reforms, both of which were key elements to Thatcher’s success. And in any case, there’s little evidence that her party’s reform package will be much harsher than Schröder’s current agenda. “Merkel will not be an eiserne Kanzlerin, nor a Margaret Thatcher, nor a radical reformer,” says Peter Lösche, a political scientist at the University of Göttingen.

Indeed, it is easy to forget that Germany’s political system intentionally makes it difficult to centralize authority for obvious reasons.

Compared with Britain or France, Germany’s political structure gives much more power to the states and quasi-public institutions””?such as unions””?at the expense of the chancellor, who, as in Britain, is chosen not by direct election but by the winning party. But whereas in Britain and elsewhere the party with the most seats forms the government (known as “first-past-the-post”), Germany requires an absolute majority before a party can take power, meaning that the power of the leading party is usually diluted by its need to form a coalition with smaller parties. Thus, the chancellor is at the mercy of myriad factions and local power centers, any of whom can upset a risky reform package.Merkel’s reforms will be a little bit more aggressive than Schröder’s, but the bottom line will be continuity,” says Lösche.

Unless the CDU wins an absolute majority, which will be close, but unlikely, it wouldn’t have the power to simply pass any legislation it wanted to. Even if they do, we’re still dealing with a John Kerry Effect.

While it would be unfair to dismiss Merkel’s free-market bona fides completely at this point, it’s clear that her near-canonization by European and American conservatives shows how readily they gloss over the details in their search for like-minded pols the world over. Such myopia is the result of forgetting that terms like “conservative” and “market reforms” mean different things in different contexts.

Germans, and Europeans in general, have a lot of love for their social systems, despite the glaring fact that they don’t work. It will take more than the current problems to convince them of otherwise. Europeans are little Peter Pans. They’ve seen the real world and don’t want to grow up.